mjr00

This is the very definition of unnaturally: the creators of those AI songs spent a ton of money promoting them, for whatever reason.

I'm not saying it's impossible, but at a minimum it's extremely hard to game the recommendation algorithm (primarily talking about Spotify, maybe Deezer's is less sophisticated). The best way to "game" the recommendation algorithm, to kickstart a new/less-established artist profile, is to get onto popular playlists. However these playlists either have actual quality barriers (so they won't put AI slop music on) or they take $$ (so this doesn't really work with the "mass generated AI slop" approach).

Yes, last I checked at least LANDR, Amuse and Tunecore all had plans where you release for free and they take a % of royalties.

I wonder how much of this even matters. Sounds like it doesn't (aside from taking up space on Deezer's drives).

> The consumption of AI-generated music on the platform is still very low, at 1-3% of total streams, and 85% of these streams are detected as fraudulent and demonetized by the company.

Even pre-AI, music has always been a winners-take-most business. Per an article from 2022, the vast majority of artists have fewer than 50 monthly listeners[0], which I suspect is far lower now due to the flood of AI.

Not sure about Deezer, but for Spotify there is some kind of minimum to get you into any algorithmic rotation. People try to game this with bots, i.e. botted streams, but the problem with bots is that the accounts are bots, so the recommendations just become music for other bots, hence the part where 85% of the streams are botted. So it doesn't actually work, and you have to rely on old-fashioned promotion to get into any algorithmic playlists.

So 44% of uploads being AI-generated sounds bad, but it's extremely unlikely anyone will ever encounter them naturally, the same way that people don't naturally discover random, non-AI artists with 10 monthly listeners and tracks with less than 1000 plays. This isn't a defense of AI music slop, by the way; it's more pointing out that the "making a song" part only takes you about 20% of the way to becoming an artist people want to listen to. A harsh lesson our friends in /r/SunoAI are learning.

[0] https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/over-75-of-artists-on...

There's no shame in being homogenous and obvious, though.

If I'm building out an internal tool for, say, a hospital lawyer to search through malpractice lawsuits, I want my tool to be the most familiar, obvious, least-surprising UI/UX possible. Just stay out of the way and do what it's supposed to do.

The trick is, of course, that the human is still responsible for knowing when homogenous is fine, or when there's real value in the presentation. If you're making a website for, say, a VST plugin for musicians, your site may need to have a little more "pizzazz" to make your product more attractive to the target audience.

This is fundamentally the argument against all "SaaS is dead due to AI" claims.

Replicating the basic functionality for most SaaS is trivial, it's the "everything else" part that you're actually paying for.

> I’ll go against the prevailing wisdom and bet that clean code does not matter any more. No more than the exact order of items being placed in main memory matters now.

This is a really funny comment to make when the entire Western economy is propped up by computers doing multiplication of extremely large matrices, which is probably the single most obvious CompSci 101 example of when the placement of data in memory is really, really important.

This speaks more about how easy it is to buy botted vanity metrics on Spotify than anything.

The most obvious way you can tell this is inorganic is how all of the "Discovered On" are artist-specific playlists: "Eddie Dalton music", "Best of Eddie Dalton", "Eddie Dalton Hits", etc. A real artist may have some artist-specific playlists but generally their Discovered On will be more general genre playlists, like "Pop Hits" or "Hype" or "Gym Music" or whatever.

> In 5, maybe 10, certainly 15 years, I don't think as many people are going to want to learn, browse, and click through a gazillion complex websites and apps and flows when they can easily just tell their assistant to do most of it.

And how do you think their assistant will interact with external systems? If I tell my AI assistant "pay my rent" or "book my flight" do you think it's going to ephemerally vibe code something on the banks' and airlines' servers to make this happen?

You're only thinking of the tip of the iceberg which is the last mile of client-facing software. 90%+ of software development is the rest of the iceberg, unseen beneath the surface.

I agree there will be more of this but again, that does not preclude the existence of more of the big backend systems existing.

> That's all very true, but what you're missing is that the proportion of codebases that need this is shrinking relative to the total number of codebases. There's an incredible proliferation of very small, bespoke, simple, AI-coded apps, that are nonetheless quite useful. Most are being created by people who have never written a line of code in their life, who will do no maintenance, and who will not give two craps how the code looks, any more than the average YouTuber cares about the aperture of their lens or the average forum commenter care about the style of their prose.

I agree that there will be more small, single-use utilities, but you seem to believe that this will decrease the number or importance of traditional long-lived codebases, which doesn't make sense. The fact that Jane Q. Notadeveloper can vibe code an app for tracking household chores is great, but it does not change the fact that she needs to use her operating system (a massive codebase) to open Google Chrome (a massive codebase) and go to her bank's website (a massive codebase) to transfer money to her landlord for rent (a process which involves many massive software systems interacting with each other, hopefully none of which are vibe coded).

The average YouTuber not caring about the aperture of their lens is an apt comparison: the median YouTube video has 35 views[0]. These people likely do not care about their camera or audio setup, it's true. The question is, how is that relevant to the actual professional YouTubers, MrBeast et al, who actually do care about their AV setup?

[0] https://www.intotheminds.com/blog/en/research-youtube-stats/

> However, code quality is becoming less and less relevant in the age of AI coding, and to ignore that is to have our heads stuck in the sand. Just because we don't like it doesn't mean it's not true.

Strongly disagree with this thesis, and in fact I'd go completely the opposite: code quality is more important than ever thanks to AI.

LLM-assisted coding is most successful in codebases with attributes strongly associated with high code quality: predictable patterns, well-named variables, use of a type system, no global mutable state, very low mutability in general, etc.

I'm using AI on a pretty shitty legacy area of a Python codebase right now (like, literally right now, Claude is running while I type this) and it's struggling for the same reason a human would struggle. What are the columns in this DataFrame? Who knows, because the dataframe is getting mutated depending on the function calls! Oh yeah and someone thought they could be "clever" and assemble function names via strings and dynamically call them to save a few lines of code, awesome! An LLM is going to struggle deciphering this disasterpiece, same as anyone.

Meanwhile for newer areas of the code with strict typing and a sensible architecture, Claude will usually just one-shot whatever I ask.

edit: I see most replies are saying basically the same thing here, which is an indicator.

> "vibe coded" is NOT the bad thing you think it is.

It's not inherently bad in the same way that a first draft of a novel is not inherently bad.

But if someone asked me to read their novel and it was a first draft that they themselves had clearly not bothered reading or editing, I'd tell them to fuck off.

> People know what they want and need

The multi-decade existence of roles like "business analysts" and "product owners" (and sometimes "customer success") is pretty strong evidence that this is not the case.

> assume it is only a matter of time until they will be useful tools in the hands of even the untrained masses.

IMO this vastly overestimates how good the "untrained masses" are at thinking in a logical, mathematical way. Apparently something as basic as Calculus II has a fail rate of ~50% in most universities.

> Many men (Not all, but many) are there simply because they want to get laid. They're not looking for a relationship, they're looking for a hook-up, and they're not honest about their intentions.

In fairness, this is not at all exclusive to online dating.

I was really confused how this could be possible for such a seemingly simple site but it looks like it's storing + writing many new commits every time there's a new review, or new financial data, or a new show, etc.

Someone might want to tell the author to ask Claude what a database is typically used for...

Molyneux is obviously a well-known gamedev figure, but he's always been much more on the design side than programming side, as opposed to someone like Carmack or even J Blow. I wouldn't take his opinions on minutiae like coroutines as authoritative.

> Beyond the initial 2-3 minutes of novelty, what do AI generated videos really have to offer when there is no shortage of people making professional, high quality content on competing platforms?

I don't know where they got September from; Sora launched in Feb 2024[0] which was a bit before people had become tired of awful AI-generated content. There was real belief that people would be willing to spend all day scrolling a social network with infinite AI-generated content. See the similar hype with Suno AI, which started a whole "musicians are obsolete" movement before becoming mostly irrelevant.

I think Sora 2 produced quite good videos, at least of a certain type. It was very good at producing convincing low-resolution cellphone footage. Unfortunately you had to have a very creative mind to get anything interesting out of it, as the copyright and content restrictions were a big "no fun allowed" clause, which contributed to its demise. Everything on the main Sora page was the same "cute animals doing something wholesome and unexpected" video.

My "favorite" part was how the post-generation checks would self-report. e.g. It was impossible to make a video of an angry chef with a British accent because Sora would always overfit it to Gordon Ramsey, and flag its own generated video after it was created!

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39386156 - only one mention of "AI slop" in the entire thread, though partial credit goes to "movieslop".

AFAIK both of these use cases had many millions of invested dollars dumped into them during the Blockchain hype and neither resulted in anything. It might not be an exact match for (1), but there was famously the ASX blockchain project[0] which turned out to be a total failure. For (2), IBM made "Farmer Connect"[1], which is now almost entirely scrubbed from their website, which promised to do supply chain logistics on a blockchain.

[0] https://www.reuters.com/markets/australian-stock-exchanges-b...

[1] https://mediacenter.ibm.com/media/Farmer+Connect+%2B+IBM/1_8...

> why are the examples given of futuristic capabilities always so visionless - it's always booking a flight or scheduling a meeting.

This AI wave is filled with "ideas guys/gals" who thought they had an amazing awesome idea and if only they knew how to program they could make a best-selling billion dollar idea, being confronted with the reality that their ideas are really uninteresting as well.

They're still happy to write blog posts about how their bleeding-edge Claw setup sends them a push notification whenever someone comments on one of their LinkedIn posts, though.

edit: Removing, not productive to engage with this.

edit: Removing, not productive to engage with this. pre-emptive apology to dang/tom if this gets cleaned up, most of this thread is not productive and I should not have continued responding much earlier.

Nothing more to discuss here, the commit history (and your lack of coherent responses beyond hypothetical "it's technically possible it COULD have happened this way") speak for themselves. Thanks for trying though.

edit: Wait, you don't "have buddies at NVidia" -- you literally work at NVidia. Weird that you tried to hide this information? No wonder you're so desperate to pretend this project is more than it actually is though, it must be embarrassing for you that your company didn't scrub git history properly before making this public!

I asksed you specific questions and you failed to answer all of them, I think that says everything. Thanks.

> Again, I ask you -- what is the reason for them to edit commit history to show incremental progress as if it were written in a weekend, when it actually was not?

Answer this question or we're done here, thanks.

> Almost certainly this was built in house for at least a month or two prior. Then private repo. Approvals. Then public.

Source, other than you making it up?

> That's more plausible than the very normal practice of developing internally, scrubbing commits of any accidental whoopsies, vetting it and then putting it out publicly

Could you point to a specific commit you believe is a representation of an internal data transfer from a separate source control system which is not representative of work achievable within the time period represented by the differential between the commit time and the time of the prior commit?

Okay, so there's overwhelming evidence that their public github history is accurate and Nemoclaw was written in a weekend, and the only reason to think it's not accurate is that... it's technically possible to edit git history, and also there's no reasonable explanation for why they would have edited git history they way they did.

So... yeah, draw your own conclusion I guess, whatever.

> It's extremely normal to have work in one, perhaps internal, repo which you then blast over to a public repo in one (or a few) big commits.

Did you even read the commit history? That is not what is happening here.

This is turning into a "don't believe your lying eyes" situation. Why are you people so desperate to pretend this wasn't written in a weekend?

> There is zero reason for them to let you see their internal progress.

Again, I ask you -- what is the reason for them to edit commit history to show incremental progress as if it were written in a weekend, when it actually was not?

There's nothing clean about the history. You think commits like [0], with the commit message "improve", count as "clean"? What do you think the motivation for the author would be to modify git history to make it appear that this was written over a weekend, including separating each feature/commit by a few hours, which corresponds to a reasonable amount of time that it may have taken to write that feature? Including a break on Mar 15 at 1:18 AM PDT before continuing to commit at Mar 15 at 12:43 PM PDT. Hey, isn't there a normal human behaviour that occurs around this time every day which takes 6-10 hours?

I'm fully aware you can rewrite git history to whatever you want, but this is an occam's razor situation here. You'd only think this wasn't a weekend project if you desperately wanted to believe that this was some major initiative for some reason.

[0] https://github.com/NVIDIA/NemoClaw/commit/b9382d27d13b160dcf...

> it's the new norm that you put together stuff, it works and you show it off.

You're probably right, but it'd be nice if the new norm were you put together stuff quickly using AI-assisted coding, you use it yourself and iterate on the product for a while as you discover things you dislike/features you want/etc, and then you share it with the world.

It seems like everyone wants to skip the second step. Most of the "Show HN" sloppa that gets built in a few days and shared here ends up abandoned immediately after.

> Sorry to be the one to inform you that we edit history in git.

Who is "we"? Do you work for NVidia?

> There has been reporting on nemoclaw for the last couple weeks.

The earliest reporting I've seen was yesterday. Can you link something from prior to March 14?

edit: I did find some articles from before March 14[0] which says NVidia was "prepping" this. Which is extremely funny, because it means they were hyping up software which hadn't even started being written yet. The AI bubble truly does not stop delivering.

> Are you supposing that journalists were writing about software that hadn't even been designed?

If you think journalists writing about things that will never exist is new, welcome to the real world. There's a whole term for it.[1]

[0] https://fudzilla.com/nvidia-opens-the-gates-with-nemoclaw/

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaporware